There are a lot of voices tugging on the conversation that shapes on the life of the church. Unfortunately, a lot of them are external to the day-to-day workings of a local church.
If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of voices like civic religion and click-happy media here’s what I would like to hear us talk about:
Over 10 years ago, I decided that church planting was where the action was. I joined a young church, read books, listened to podcasts and hung out with planters.
Six months ago, we launched Austin Mustard Seed. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting. This isn’t it.
It’s better.
An encyclopedia could be written about the difficulties of church planting. What gets lost is the unexpected joys along the way. Such as:
Recently I heard the term “church planter” defined as “the people who are willing to go where no one else wants to go and do what no one else wants to do.” It’s shockingly true. When we were recruiting for our launch team, it seemed like we heard an endless stream of “go, be warm and well fed.” Continue Reading…
Check out the Boots on the Ground Facebook page to see all the different posts in this series.
The night it felt like Church to me happened in the Summer of 2002. I was a sophomore in college and I had given my summer to working with Dry Bones: Denver, a newly launched ministry to the homeless youth that congregate to panhandle and roughhouse on Denver’s 16th Street Mall.
My reasons for being there weren’t completely altruistic, evangelistic or justice driven. That was a part of it, but the main reason I wanted to be there was because it seemed pretty cool.
There was a thing that happened on the internet, in DC and in the poorest countries on earth last week.
A lot of people were hurt. A lot of people felt the need to draw line in sand. There are a few dead bodies on mountain tops.
I’m not one of them.
There are two reasons I’m not overwhelmed by this:
For hundreds of years, common wisdom assumed that the countries of the West were Christian nations.
This concept began when Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of his empire. It was reinforced with the advent of Protestant National churches. Then, beginning with John Winthrop’s famous “City on a Hill” sermon in 1630, civic religion and cultural Christianity became intertwined in the institutions of the United States.
The result was that Westerners were generally considered “Christian”. Individuals often had a normative level of Biblical literacy. Institutions, government, and leaders were assumed to espouse “Christian values”. In this “Christendom” system, conversion often meant claiming membership in a specific denomination and church attendance. Politicians were expected to attend Church and govern in “Christian” ways. There was little discernible difference between being a good citizen and a follower of Christ.
For decades now, these institutional structures have been breaking down. Most countries in Europe are predominantly secular and often skeptical of religion. The U.S. does not seem to be far behind. Stuart Murray defines this “post-Christendom” as:
the culture that emerges as the Christian faith loses coherence within a society that has been definitively shaped by the Christian story and as the institutions that have been developed to express Christian convictions decline in influence (Stuart Murray, The Naked Anabaptist, 78).
This means that forms of churches that might have thrived under Christendom are either showing diminishing returns or have failed altogether.
Followers of Christ in the west now have the opportunity to define themselves apart from the expectations of their culture. Conversations are thriving around the word “missional,” as churches and Christian organizations seek to understand what it means to be missionaries in this new post-Christendom context.
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